| rev:text
| - I usually don't feel inclined to write a review unless my experience was exceptionally great or grotesque. Bestellen was neither but was disappointing middle of the road good for us only. I think it's still trying to find the formula.
We came on a Friday night right at prime time and the place was not even half full. Chef Rossi was in the house but appeared to be entertaining family or guests at another table and was not actually working. Maybe that was the issue.
Our experience can be summed up by mediocre execution and communication between the waitstaff and kitchen staff, which by the way on Friday night the place was very well staffed in terms of number of people working the tables and kitchen. I've seen half as many staff execute in fine fashion to a much larger group of patrons at other establishments.
Anyway onto the food. We had the charcuterie board (3.5*) to start. It was well executed, meaty, and tasty. But it seem to lack range or variety as most pieces were a derivative of some type of salami. We expected more variety especially since we ordered the larger board.
Afterwards this where things started to go a bit in disarray. My two companions had ordered appetizers as mains and I went with the obligatory steak...opting for the smaller sirlion tip option. We also decided to add 4 side dishes, zucchini flowers and garlic scapes (4*), chichorron (4*), roasted beats (4.5*), and fries (2.5*) to go with my steak. But timing of dishes coming up seemed come out at random. The zucchini flowers and chichorron came together...OK...they are a good munchies. But then one of the appetizers-mains beef tartar (3.5* - tasty and beefy, but in our opinion the creamy caesar style mix was not our favourite plus the side chips were over salted) came on it's own. The waiter realized the mistake afterwards. But we still needed to wait 10 min for the scallops and steak. The scallops (3.5*) are bumped down a * for again being oversalted. My steak was the star of the night (4*) very tasty, perfectly medium rare with a chimichurri sauce...but this time around was a bit lightly salted. The bigger issue was they plated it was the side of beets instead of the fries...which we needed to waited another 10mins for and were a bit overcooked though the side of homemade smoked ketchup and mayor were good. OOPS??
The restaurants been open for several months now and given the room was at best half full at any given time and there was ample staff to handle everything, I found the lack of execution and poor communication to be quite disappointing. Maybe it's time for Chef Rossi to get a better handle over his staff...otherwise he may see more sparsely packed Friday nights.
Final note. I've been fan of Mercatto prior, during, and now after Chef Rossi's tenure. It's a testament to a well run and managed operation that the food and service can transcend a single person. Hopefully he can apply his learnings there to BestEllen.
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)
![[cxml]](/fct/images/cxml_doc.png)
![[csv]](/fct/images/csv_doc.png)
![[text]](/fct/images/ntriples_doc.png)
![[turtle]](/fct/images/n3turtle_doc.png)
![[ld+json]](/fct/images/jsonld_doc.png)
![[rdf+json]](/fct/images/json_doc.png)
![[rdf+xml]](/fct/images/xml_doc.png)
![[atom+xml]](/fct/images/atom_doc.png)
![[html]](/fct/images/html_doc.png)